Posted by
on Sunday, January 14, 2007 6:13:37 PM
Normally on Sundays, you don't see Marcie or I unless Sabrina is unable to blog. But as the "editor-in-chief" of Running The Gauntlet, and formerly of The Asylum, I feel a certain obligation in addressing an op-ed penned by Johnathan Chait and pointed out by Allah at Hot Air. Now, our readers know that I, personaly, am not to fond of Mr. Chait. He's on the Left. I'm on the Right, and we rarely see eye-to-eye on things. But his op-ed today makes a good point:I DON'T WANT to accuse American doves of rooting for the United States to lose in Iraq because I know they love their country and understand the dire consequences of defeat. But the urge to gloat is powerful, and some of them do seem to be having a grand time in the wake of being vindicated.
Radar magazine recently published an article bemoaning the fact that pro-war liberal pundits have not been drummed out of the profession for their error. In it, lefty foreign policy guru Jonathan Schell sniffs, "There doesn't seem to be a rush to find the people who were right about Iraq and install them in the mainstream media."
Being right about something is a fairly novel experience for Schell, and he's obviously enjoying it immensely. But before we genuflect to Schell's wisdom, it's worth recalling that his own record of prognostication is not exactly perfect. After the 9/11 attacks, Schell railed against attacking the Taliban, which was sheltering Osama bin Laden and much of the Al Qaeda hierarchy. "A military strike against the Taliban or any other regime is full of perils that … are far greater than the dangers we already face," he warned. For instance, he wrote, "millions of Afghans could starve to death this winter," Pakistan's government could be overthrown, etc.
Yep. So many pundits and members of the MSM predicted dire consequences for our troops with an invasion of Afghanistan. Within a week of being on the ground, people like former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Vice President Cheney were asked if we were in a "quagmire?" They were asked if we were worried about losing to a group of people who successfully fought against, and drove the Soviets from their nation. Of course, the media frenzy over our "quagmire" failed to recall that we had helped the mujahadeen against the Soviets. This time, we weren't going to be helping our enemies. But, I digress ...
Or go back to the last war we fought with Iraq. Schell insisted that we could force Iraq to leave Kuwait with sanctions alone, rather than by using military force. But the years that followed that war made it clear just how impotent that tool was. Saddam Hussein endured more than a decade of sanctions rather than give up a weapons of mass destruction program that turned out to be nonexistent. If sanctions weren't enough to make him surrender his imaginary weapons, I think we can safely say they wouldn't have been enough to make him surrender a prized, oil-rich conquest.
Most liberals made the same argument as Schell in 1990, and as subsequent years exposed the silliness of the claim, many of them were humbled. Indeed, most Democrats in the Senate voted against the Persian Gulf War, and that vote disqualified many of them from running for president in 1992. The presidential nomination went to a governor, Bill Clinton, who didn't have to vote on the war, and he selected as his running mate then-Sen. Al Gore, one of a handful of Democrats who supported it.
Gore certainly deserves credit for his foresight as one of the very few public figures to support the first Iraq war and oppose the second. (Having supported both, I'm batting .500.) But this method of judging one's worth solely by his or her record of supporting or opposing the right wars has pretty limited value. Sen. John Kerry, who opposed the first Iraq war and favored the second, has a more dismal record than Vice President Dick Cheney, who at least got one of his wars right. Does that mean Cheney is necessarily a wiser foreign policy sage than Kerry?
We definitively know now (and some of us have known for some time) that the UN is completely and utterly ineffectual. They stink. Their "harsh language" and "threats" barely gain notice of the dictators and tyrants they threaten. Saddam thumbed his nose at the UN for twelve years before we finally said enough was enough. There were many reasons for going into Iraq. Among them were his ties to terrorist groups in the region, his continued flouting of UN resolutions, his continued attacks against our forces enforcing the no-fly zones, and yes, even WMDs. And while we have found some WMDs and components, there wasn't the vast amounts that many people believed we would find. Fine. Split hairs if you want to, but the fact remains they were there, and more than likely (based on the allegations provided by some such as former General Georges Sada) they were shipped out the door prior to our invasion. In fact, even the admitted such had happened prior to the invasion.
Does that make the critics any less relevant in our eyes? No because the critics will always be there. But critics like Mr. Chait have stated that they still support the troops and their mission. Yes, they'd like the troops to come home, but they realize that's not happening any time soon. We're giving this one last push to end the sectarian violence that is rapidly turning into a religious civil war over there. Were the critics right? Not exactly. Were the supporters right? Again, not exactly. Both sides have to admit their mistakes. And that is a point Mr. Chait makes a little later ...
What's even sillier is judging someone's foreign policy insight solely based on his or her stance on the last war. Over-learning the lessons of the last war is a classic foreign policy blunder. Yet many liberals want to make the lessons of the Iraq debacle the central basis of American foreign policy. The story in Radar is of a piece with this growing impulse.
But this is the flip side of the same impulse that got us into the current mess. Because the doves made so many bad predictions leading up to the Gulf War — remember the mass uprisings in the Arab world and tens of thousands of U.S. casualties? — many of us ignored warnings this time that proved more prescient.
There are many lessons to be absorbed from Iraq. We'd be foolish not to absorb them; only the most dense war supporter has come away from the experience unhumbled. But the failure of a criminally negligent administration to carry out a highly challenging rebuilding task in the most hostile part of the world does not teach us everything we need to know about the efficacy of military power.
Of course we'll learn lessons from Iraq. I'm worried that we'll learn too much.
Now I take offense to the "criminally negligent" part of his argument because that entails that the president knowingly put our troops into a country that was going to come apart at the seems. He had advisors telling him that things would go fine. Not fine in the sense that this was going to be a cake walk, but that we wouldn't have the excess difficulties that we do now. We didn't know al-Sadr was there. We didn't know the extent of al Qaeda infiltration in Iraq. And we didn't expect the former Ba'athists to put up as much of a fight as they were. Mistake. Mistake Mistake.
But we're learning. Granted, this is the worst way to learn these lessons, but all war never goes the way it's planned. We learn lessons from going to war. We learned them in our war of independance, and from the Civil War, and World War I, and World War II, and so on. This war we'll learn new lessons. But the one I think Mr. Chait is trying to remind us of is that the doves aren't right in wanting to leave the field of battle now. Had the doves succeeded with that in World War II (granted there weren't as many of them being as vocal), the French would probably be speaking German today, and the UK would be the lone outpost of freedom in Europe.
If the doves win the debate this time, we're in trouble. We can't afford to run from these animals again. Doing so will only inflame the situation worse. They'll keep coming at us. There is a time where a stand needs to be taken, and the doves need to remain relatively silent. We're there. We're engaged. You can have your criticism, but part of that critique should not include a demand to retreat. That's what the doves are preaching, and that's why they can't win. We've learned this lesson now, that some enemies won't simply fade away as history goes by. History right now shows us, through the rhetoric of the enemy, that they beleive they're at a turning point in history. That this is the great and final crusade. Their objectives are clear.
And so are ours. We must win. We can't retreat. It's the only way we're going to survive. And THAT is a lesson we all need to learn and comprehend. If we really love this nation as many of us profess, then the answer to the dilemma is not withdrawal and appeasement. It's stay, stand and fight.
Publius II